After months of planning, hours of meetings, and many, many debates - of varying degrees of heat - Observer Food Monthly has compiled its list of the 50 best cookbooks ever. Amazingly, there were no outright arguments, although that's not to say the final selection won't provoke a few. We can't promise to please all-comers. After all, one person's sauce-stained personal favourite is another's shelf-filling waste of space.

That cookbooks arouse such passion is one of the reasons we put together the list in the first place. For some, they'll never be simply utilitarian, rather volumes whose secrets, over time, become woven into the texture of everyday life. Then there are the magnificently obsessed who devour them for pleasure, as you would a novel. And that cookbooks can also double as guides to other cultures will be obvious to anyone who's ever read Claudia Roden.

We called on an esteemed panel of judges, an authoritative sounding board of cooks and food writers, including Fergus Henderson, Prue Leith and Bill Buford. Pooling such collective wisdom unearthed obscure delights, such as the 16th century Opera dell'arte del cucinare – where to start if you want to know what Renaissance popes had for lunch – as well as reminders of quirky curiosities such as thriller writer Len Deighton's Action Cookbook.